Google Play Now Offering Gift Certificates

Google Give It’s Play Store A Push With Gift Certificates and Wishlists

There is no secret that Google is trying to drive their ecosystem with a fully loaded media store much like iTunes. The Google Play Store has been through many changes through time and for those that use Android devices, this is just one of many places you can buy apps, music, movies, books and more. Unlike the closed Apple ecosystem, Android users have the ability to sideload apps and media from any source they choose. This freedom to choose means that Google really has to make their store appealing to the consumer for it to be successful, but this openness has also been the building blocks of Android’s success. Google is now ready to start pushing their store harder than ever to gear up for the holiday shopping season and the recent changes are proof of just that.

Gift Cards And Wish Lists

This may seem like small incremental and obvious updates to the Play Store, but in actuality these new changes may make a huge impact on the overall success of this content and app destination. Wish lists are a great way to keep what consumers want right in front of them on a regular basis and these wish lists will also be shareable so you can tell your friends what you think is cool or useful on this app store.

The gift cards may make purchasing on the Google Play Store easier for some people who do not have a credit card to setup on Google Wallet. This will certainly be a big win for kids that have android devices, now parents can regulate spending without trusting their children with their credit card. With the Christmas buying season coming up in the next few months, Google Play gift cards will also prove to be a great way to bring more money to the Google Play Store from people that do not even own android devices and this is a great way to grow their brand and of course, profitability.

Smart App Updates

As promised from Google at their huge developers conference Google IO 2012, the new way to update apps has finally been implemented. You must have automatic updates turned on, but the new incremental updates feature promises to save you costly mobile bandwidth as well as save battery usage on your device. For developers this update is seamless, because the magic is all done on the backend by Google, so there is nothing special needed to make this feature work. Unlike iPhone users, Android devices will be able to perform these incremental update, that make the update a fraction of the size of uploading the complete application all over again.

There has also been some small, but frequent updates to the media that is available on this store. They have a long way to go to catch up with iTunes or Netflix when it comes to video content, but don’t be surprised if you see Google make some big deals with content vendors before December.